The emergence of geography: exploration and mapping

Abstract

As people travel, they encounter different environments and peoples. Such variations are intellectually stimulating: Why do people and places differ? Stores of knowledge were built up about such new and exotic places, as demonstrated by the Greek philosopher and world traveler Herodotus in the 5th century bce. That knowledge became known as geography, a term first used as the title of Eratosthenes of Cyrene’s book Geographica in the 3rd century bce. Such was the volume of knowledge compiled thereafter that Strabo’s Geography, published three centuries later, comprised 17 volumes. Its first two provided a wide-ranging review of previous writings, and the other 15 contained descriptions of particular parts of what was then the known world. Soon thereafter Ptolemy collated a large amount of information about the latitude and longitude of places in his seminal work.